


Kindling

by InkSkratches



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-22
Updated: 2012-11-22
Packaged: 2017-11-19 05:48:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/569791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkSkratches/pseuds/InkSkratches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eridan has dodged all of life's obstacles, only to find that his greatest enemy is time itself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kindling

There is one thing they fail to tell you growing up. One thing you’re never warned of if you happen to dodge all the rest of life’s surprises.

Death is a process.

Perhaps they expect you to slip up somewhere. And fuck knows you’ve come close. You’ve watched entire ships sink right next to you in a sheet of misting flames. You’ve contended with unjust (and stunningly factual) accusations of being in league with an unlawful resistance. You’ve been chased to hell and back by the Empress’ hounds. And in each of those instances there was death. Black and leering, fangs dripping. Because a single snap of those jaws was all it took to snuff out entire planets. Sweeps and sweeps of life bitten off in one finite movement. The period at the end of a story. One single point. Finished.

It all led you to believe that this, too, would be how your story together would end. In life you were brilliant, frothing, violent explosions. Crackling fire and rage and passion made flesh, and the only way such brilliant fire could be snuffed was by those finite jaws. That period at the end. The cut would be quick and clean, and you would be ready when it came.

But death, in its leering silence, had never told you that the largest fires cannot be snuffed all at once. That sometimes it takes not one bite. But four. Ten. Nibbling at the wick of your fire until there’s simply nothing left to kindle.

…

Sollux often complained of migraines. It would always come in moments of silence. You would be curled in the corner of your high-backed sofa, paging through one of your historical tomes without really reading it, eyes flicking up to his hunched silhouette against the glare of the husktop’s screen. And you would begin pushing your tongue out from between your fangs, running the pad of your thumb over it before pressing it to the corner of the dry parchment and making a crisp movement with your wrist to—ssk—turn the page. And you could almost see the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He would hunch down further in his chair and—ssk—type louder at the keys until—ssk—he made some snarky comment to which you would—ssk—not deign to reply and at last he would—ssk—he would turn just slightly and—ssk—you could see the yellow tinge high on his cheekbones just under the red and blue of his oval glasses—ssk—his eyes hidden but obviously pressed on you as you put your thumb to your tongue again—ssk—and then,

“Will you fucking stop, you’re giving me a migraine.”

And you’d smirk with one corner of your mouth and snap the book shut because the game was over and he knew it. Oh, he’d attempt to drag it out. If there was one thing you had in common it was your hatred of losing. So he’d bristle like some beast, low blood that he was, as you came up to the armrest of his chair and perched yourself there, pulling your cape over his shoulders like some silken purple blanket. You’d see that tooth then, the one that poked out over his lips, that became more prominent as he grimaced, that softened his sibilance as he hissed “stop.” But you wouldn’t stop. You were good at a lot of things. But listening wasn’t one of them.

“I’m just tryin’ to be aware a your delicate pus blooded sensibilities,” you’d croon as you lifted one hand to the back of his neck. And though you couldn’t see the way his eyes lidded, you could feel the tension leak out of him and into the tips of your fingers. And you’d rub small circles, your fangs digging into your lips as you watched his stiff wiry frame loosen. Become supple in your hands. Pliant. And he couldn’t even find it in himself to complain as you leaned forward and pressed a kiss just under his ear, where you could feel his pulse fever-bright against your lips.

That’s how it would play out. Until the the routine cracks and shifts. Like a continent moving on a hairline fracture that causes the very ground beneath your feet to tremble.

You go through the entirety of the game. The flipping pages, the hunching of his shoulders, the affirmation of the headache that you are giving him with all your coquettish antagonism. But when you perch on his armrest and reach out to rub at his neck, he hisses and elbows you away. Energy crackles about his eyes as he shoots his gaze at you accusingly, fangs bared not in their familiar coy grimace but in the defensive snarl of genuine pain. You’re left holding your hand up like a whipped beast, and you blink. Because you are good at a lot of things, but improvisation isn’t one of them. And you’ve been reading from this script for sweeps.

“Sol?” your voice is pathetic even to your ears. A small thing, dangling at the end of a cut rope.

He turns away from you and lets his fingers dance over the keys of his husktop. You watch them for a while, watch as they flick faster, hitting buttons whose symbols have long since been worn away. You catch his wrist and pull. And he slams the keyboard back under the monitor and turns away, seething, even as you lift his hand to your lips and kiss the knuckles. He smells damp and musty, like stale sweat, like he always does, and that bit of familiarity stills the odd throbbing at the base of your sternum, and you simply give yourself over to kissing him. Up his wrist and inside his forearm and to the crook of his elbow and then he shudders with his whole body and that little snaggletooth pokes out from between his lips and you can tell he’s smiling now, so you lean over and kiss the corner of his mouth as well.

You don’t engage in that game again. Because you catch him at odd intervals—mornings in the ablution block or when he thinks you’re absorbed at your own husktop—reaching under his glasses to rub at his eyes or pressing his thumbs to his temples or pinching the bridge of his nose. It starts becoming a process, something incorporated into his daily routine: pull himself out of the sopor in the evening, rinse off, stand in front of the mirror massaging his temples, hunch over coffee and honey toast in the dining block, get dressed, go back in front of the mirror to massage his temples once more, plant himself in front of the husktop. And he thinks you don’t notice, but you do. Because you notice when he’s slept in the sopor funny and there’s that one tuft of hair at the back of his head that sticks up for the remainder of the day, and it’s very hard resisting the urge to twirl a finger around it.

So you notice the migraines. And you notice when they become more serious as well, because that’s when he stops talking about them. Now when your attentiveness slips and you find yourself jostling your books around more loudly than you’d intended, he simply snaps at you for being clumsy. Never again does he make mention of the headaches, and you sort of miss the way his tongue would soften the S’s on those words, the way it would soften _you_ , how it would make you want to perch yourself on his armrest and cup one of his horns against your palm and lean in to brush your lips against it.

The fighting cools too. Where once doing something as benign as leaving his honey uncapped in the pantry would send him into fits of rage so severe that the load gaper would end up in the middle of your study, he now simply scrapes off the crust that forms during the day and pours the honey over his toast before slumping in his chair to knead at his temples. So you find yourself checking before bed to make sure everything is sealed. Because where there is something challenging and beautiful and feverish about the way he screams and puts his hands on your neck like he earnestly means to kill you, it is less satisfying to watch him scrape exhaustedly at the mess you’ve created in your juvenile whimsy. So you clean. You fall silent. You watch him from over the top of your paper as he chews in an almost careful way. And your chest tightens with something that feels like homesickness. But how can you be homesick when you’re already home? When he’s already sitting across the table from you, frowning in that way he does as he takes a sip of coffee, like experiencing the bitter taste spreading over his tongue requires more concentration than any line of code ever could.

You begin kissing the crease that forms on his brow from all that intensity. Like his fierce way of living has finally leaked out of his pores and begun leaving permanent scars on his face. He scowls at you when you do it, digging a sharp nail along the ridge of one of your gills, but you smirk through the hot, bright pain and kiss him again. Soon you add the spidering of lines around his eyes to the parts of him that you kiss, and the little creases by his nose from every time he’s grimaced at you. “These are mine especially,” you chuckle as your lips dance around the corner of his mouth. “But you’ll never get lines from smiling, Sol, you’re incorrigibly fuckin’ sullen.”

“At least I’m not incorrigibly fucking stupid,” he says, and you kiss him just for the way the S melts in his mouth like a thing not entirely there. Like a little part of the word that he keeps for himself. And he pushes at your chest but you lean over his arm and kiss the sneer lines around his nose again.

Sollux never liked leaving the hive, but you quickly come to find that not leaving out of desire and not leaving out of inability are two very different things.

…

There are a few things in life that scare you. Being found out is one of those things. It’s a fear that has grown into you over the years. A parasite that gnaws incessantly at the base of your stomach. That sometimes creeps into your bowels and makes you kneel over the load gaper and pray for deliverance. But even then, acceptance and inescapability have dulled its fangs. So that when it bites with things like vague messages over a chat client or unsolicited knocks on your door, it’s with an almost fond recognition that you feel its teeth in your stomach.

It’s nothing like the cold, tearing bite you feel when you find him washed up on the bank of your tiny island.

It devours your insides whole. Starting with your stomach. There’s suddenly a frozen, yawning hole where it used to be, and you feel the ice begin creeping through your veins as you slide down the embankment leading up to your hive, gravel tumbling down around you. By the time you make it to the dock, the fear has consumed you. Flooded you to the point that you feel the utterly foreign sensation of drowning, and your gills flutter helplessly at your ribs, trying to suck in water that isn’t there. Because it’s at your feet, lapping at your soles, leaking through your shoes, soaking your socks, creeping up your knees, and then you’re waist deep in it, grabbing the cold, limp figure against your chest and pulling his head above the icy waves and some of the spray hits your cheeks and _tears_ you think, irrationally, because you’re too empty, too full, too consumed with the raw biting fear to let any other feeling in.

You drag him up the rocks, dripping ice, and you think that his skin looks like fish in the moonlight. Like the underside of a fish, pale and clammy. Dead. And your body buckles, your brain darkening, because no, no, no, you’re not ready, you’re not ready for this, so your mind clamors with nonsense. Rationalizations—(he’s made of honeyed fire)—anything to keep the dark ice off, to keep the jaws of that reality from clamping down around your neck.

It’s the longest two hours of your life. Longer even than the time you’d spent in the cockpit of that tiny escape vessel, fleeing from the carnage of Imperial warfare. Because as you throw logs on the fire and shove the sofa so close that sparks dance on the old velvet—as you bury him in blankets and breathe into his mouth, you notice things that have slipped past your notice until now. The way his skin doesn’t bounce back like it once did. The way his wiry muscles have begun to disintegrate beneath his flesh. The way his bones have become sharper, more brittle, like ice, and as you kneel beside him and smooth his damp hair away from his face, you find yourself worrying about bruising the taut skin of his cheeks.

And suddenly you’re not so sure that the fire inside him can ward off all this cold.

So you spend the next hour typing frantically, trying to get together your watercraft, but you’re two hundred leagues from the nearest medical facility, and Feferi is assuring you that staying put is the best option but

howw

howw

you fuckin tell me howw that can be right wwhen hes not fuckin respondin and hes so cold

hes so fuckin cold land dwwellers arent supposed to get cold like that fef its not natural

oh god oh fuck please come fef please help me

im leavvin

im leavvin

i havve to get to a place i gotta get him out of here

And you come so close to making good on that promise, to pressing a heating cube to his chest and bundling him in the back of your craft and just going, when he manages to peel one eye open and shiver at you.

You’re on him instantly, yelling, cursing, cupping his face, and by then the fear has receded enough to allow parts of you to fill with relief—with tears—and it leaks out of your eyes until his hair is damp again, and you kiss every line in his face, and there are more of them now, but they are warming under your lips, warming because there is still fire inside him, still life, and when he mumbles something unintelligible at you, all you can do is curse and laugh and cry into the nape of his neck.

You finally get the story out of him, a few days later. How he’d tried to fly over to one of the islands not more than three leagues away from your hive in order to scavenge for fruits. Something he had done hundreds, thousands, of times before, and something that had, this time, inexplicably, caused his psionics to give out mid-flight, to send him crashing into the cold dark waves, failing against the water until his strength gave out and he was pillowed back to the rocky embrace of your home shore.

He doesn’t react when you forbid him to attempt it again. He doesn’t say anything as you spend the next perigree building up the cushions on his chair, lining your shared recuperacoon with more sopor, cradling his thin body close when you sleep. He goes about his days as normally as ever, eating breakfast with you and quietly tapping at his computer. And though the lines around his eyes have acquired a new depth, he does not seem unhappy. So it’s not until several perigrees later that you learn the difference between not wanting to leave and not being able to.

…

It starts as an argument. It always starts as an argument. It doesn’t even matter what it’s about because what matters is the way he grabs the belt loops of your trousers. The way he fists his hands in your hair like he hasn’t done in what feels like sweeps. The way you drag his arms away by the wrists, breathing angrily against his lips, “Don’t you dare fuckin’ touch me,” and of course it makes him touch you more. Makes his fingers scrabble at your hips, slide up your shirt, trace the dip of your spine, the muscles around your shoulder blades. And you’re grappling with him then, falling deep down into that hot, black place, that place that boils like pitch somewhere deep in your gut, and he leans against you, biting at your lip, sucking purple blood into his mouth, breathing, breathing with a hot passion you’d almost forgotten, and then you both slip off the chair, and you feel the crackle of psionics at your wrists and yes, god, fuck, fuck this mustard-blooded shit, fuck him and the way he lifts your shirt up with his teeth as he straddles your waist, the way the psionics buzz at your ankles and wrists, the way you can feel his bulge pressing against yours, the way he slides his hips against yours, grinding against you, the way his lip creeps up and that smirk, that fucking smirk. You arch your back, exposing all the most vulnerable parts of yourself, and he pounces, covering your uppermost gill with his lips, running his tongue along the ridge, and everything is so hot and moist and dizzying perfect that you never notice. You don’t notice his psionics fizzle out until you’re pulling your hands up to run them through his hair, to cling to his back. Until you bend your knees and wrap a leg around his thin waist. Until you are so far gone that all you can do is arch and gasp his name into his ear and reach down his pants to free him from the clothes keeping you apart, because surely that’s all it it’s been, all this time, surely one quick flick of your hand will bring you both close, warm, and you’ll have bridged every gap, filled every hole, patched up every crumbling bit of foundation—

He pulls away from you. Jerks back like he’s been stung. And then you see him. Frail. Hunched. Straddling your waist, the skin hanging loose on his bones. And your own chest, tight, smooth, heaving. Strong beneath him. And it’s then you realize what you’ve done.

He tries to stumble off, but you catch at his wrist. You pull it close, and you try to kiss it, just there, but he yanks his arm away like you’ve burned him. Like all you can do now is hurt him. And you sit up, and you draw him in, gentler this time. You try to pull him to your chest and lie back down with him. Because it’s fine. It’s fine. You can try again. Look, you’re lying down for him. All he has to do is start the psionics up. Just start them back up, they’re fine, they’re fine, they’re fine, please please please.

He hits you then. Backhands you across the face, his whole body shuddering with the effort of it, but his eyes are pools of liquid fire. And you fall back against the floor, breath gone, and he says the thing you never wanted him to say, the thing you never wanted to hear.

“They’re not fucking fine.”

He tries to get up again. To leave. But you lurch forward and seize him about the waist with arms that are twice the size of his. It makes the ensuing struggle a feeble and sad one. He grabs at your horns and yanks and claws desperately at your shoulders until violet blood runs down your back, but after a few minutes he settles against the nape of your neck and shudders and clings to you and sobs with dry, wracking heaves. And you try not to join him, because you refuse to believe what he’s already accepted, but the tears make it out of your eyes anyway.

“They’re not fucking fine. I’m useless. I’m worse than useless. I can’t even fucking leave this place.”

Something tight and hot knots in your throat and the voice that creeps over your lips is scared and small. Smaller than he is.

“Do you want to leave?”

He buries his face in your shoulder and you can feel fresh tears hot and wet against your skin and his voice is hoarse with them. “No. Fuck. I never want to leave, dammit, and that’s the fucking point. That’s the fucking point, Eridan.”

“I love you,” you whisper. Desperately. Fiercely. “I’ll love you forever.”

“Not forever,” he chokes against you. “Don’t say that, don’t say that, are you fucking stupid, don’t you get it?”

You kiss him then. You pull him away from your shoulder and kiss him so fiercely that all he can do is fall limp against you. And you lay him on the ground and feel his chest shake with sobs even as you trace your lips over it. Even as you undo the button on his pants and pull him out, laving your tongue over him. And he grips your hair with a kind of ferocity that one has the last time they do anything, and you taste your own tears as much as you taste him, and something in your chest tightens with a desperate cry to please not let this be the last time. To please not let it be the last time his thighs shudder against your ears, the last time he arches his back, the last time he chokes your name like it’s the only word he’s ever known, the last time the room explodes in a shower of red and blue light as he slips over the edge.

But death takes things in pieces, and there is a last time for everything.

…

You bring him breakfast. He can’t eat the toast anymore, not with his teeth the way they are. That snaggly one you always used to run your tongue over has long since fallen out, and now he takes his bread soft and pulped up with the honey he liked so much. The honey you’re not sure he can even taste anymore. His eyes are clouded, a pink and a robin’s egg blue, and there’s no recognition there now.

Two sweeps ago he used to search for you with his hands. Used to trace the shapes of your name with his lips as you spooned honey slop into his mouth. And you would touch the knuckle of your forefinger just under the hollowed dip of his temple, where the webbing of wrinkles beside his eye would crease and he would reach for you with trembling fingers, spotted with age, and he would cling to you and apologize, and the honey would dribble over his lips and you would scrape it off with the edge of the spoon and bite your lips so hard they bled.

But now he simply opens his mouth and accepts the food. If you lay your cheek against his and whisper oaths of love into his ear, he’ll smile. And for a while you imagine it is a tiny part of him that you still have. Until one day, a day where he’s recalcitrant and horrible, a day he opts to push at your arm instead of eat. That’s the day you snap. Throw the spoon and smash the honey on the ground and tell him to just die already. And he rocks back in his seat and laughs, drool oozing from the corners of his toothless mouth.

You go into the ablution trap then. Without bothering to remove your clothes, you turn on the icy spray, turn it on and let it wash over you, and you curl yourself on the tile, pulling your cape over your head, trying to remember what it had been like when he would put his hands against you with purpose. When his touch had been hot and firm and all you’d ever needed. And you shudder under the icy rain. Shudder and heave and weep for the part of him that you’ve already lost. Cry out for him like some orphaned child, hugging your knees, feeling your cheek sink into the grooves in the tile. But that part of him never comes. Never presses soft lips to your fins, never smirks with that tooth you liked so much, never softens the S’s on his pliant tongue. So all that is left for you is to return to the dining block, return to the table where he’s fallen asleep in his chair, and sweep up the glass and scrub the honey from the floorboards. Then you pull the blanket off his shoulders, gently tug the clothes from his body, and carry him over to the recuperacoon. You cradle him close in the slime, like you always have, like you always will, and you whisper apologies in his ear. Because you don’t know what you’d do without him, and, as you have for five sweeps already, you let your voice dip to a trembling breath of sound.

“I’ll love you forever. Please let me love you forever. Please don’t leave.”

He sighs against you in the slime, eyelids sunken and translucent, and you pull him close, your heart throbbing inside your chest, and every night you’re sure it can’t possibly hurt worse, and every night it still somehow does.

Until the morning you wake up, and he feels so light against you. Like a husk. And you don’t even have to try to squeeze him awake to know that he won’t respond. All you can do is clamber out of the pod and drop to your knees on the floor with a thick splat before scrabbling into the corner to be violently sick.

Once it’s over, once everything’s been cleaned and changed, and his frail body wrapped in your silken purple cape, you sit at the edge of your dock for a long time. You sit and watch the sun climb into the sky, feel it bake your skin dry, feel it burn, and then feel the cold creep back into your limbs as night approaches. And you stare into the waves, their crests catching the last fiery rays of sunset, and you wonder how flames can spark so vividly on the sea. You wonder how two things so different could ever produce anything more than ephemeral mist.

You wonder what it will mean to live without him.

Because nobody ever told you that the leering creature you watched all your life, with its gaping jaws and dripping fangs, sometimes takes things a nibble at a time. That the troll who would throw fits over lines of code and crusted honey, who burned so hot and vibrant, and only for you, would somehow find his life without kindling enough to sustain it.

But now you know. Better than anyone.

How cold it is when the fire goes out.

So you clean the shores of beach wood. You pile the logs and brambles and sticks together, and perch him on top of it. You douse everything in oil and light him up.

The flame that leaps forth is so tall you swear it licks the bottoms of the clouds. It flickers and waves and dances in the night, blotting out the light of every star, of the moon itself, evaporating the tears from your cheeks, and you breathe in the sweltering heat of it, because for one last moment, he has set your world on fire.


End file.
